Information About Dylan - Claremont tutor

Personal Description:

I am currently a masters student in mathematics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. I received a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from the University of Cape Town in 2015, and then a B.Sc. Honours in Mathematics from Stellenbosch University in 2016. Since then I have worked as a software developer for a number of years, and am now returning to academics.

Tutoring Experience:

From 2016 to 2019, I was a tutor in the Department of Mathematics at Stellenbosch University. During this time, I tutored and marked assignments for the following courses:
Mathematics 114 (Calculus) from 2016 to 2019
Mathematics 144 (Calculus and Linear Algebra) from 2016 to 2019
Mathematics 214 (Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra) in 2019
Mathematics 244 (Analysis and Linear Algebra) in 2019
Mathematics 279 (Foundations of Abstract Mathematics) from 2016 to 2017
Engineering Mathematics 214 (Differential Equations and Linear Algebra) from 2017 to 2018
Engineering Mathematics 242 (Series, Partial Differential Equations, and Fourier Transforms) from 2017 to 2018.

In 2014 I was a tutor in the Department of Computer Science at UCT, and in 2023, I was a tutor in the Department of Mathematics. Here I tutored MAM1008S, and the Real Analysis module of MAM2000W.

I have also been involved in the training of the South African teams for the International and Pan-African Mathematics Olympiads. Each year from 2013, I have been a coach at an annual training camp held in Stellenbosch each December that is the first stage of the selection and training program for the national teams. During this time, I was usually also a coach at the follow-up camp held in April each year.

Tutoring Approach:

I believe that it is important not to just give students the answers to questions, but to help students to be able to answer the questions themselves. I try to identify any misconceptions that a student may have, but also try to reinforce the knowledge that a student already has and try to encourage students to make a start on a problem even if they can not immediately see how to solve it. Often they are able to make more progress than what they anticipate.

I believe that having an understanding of why methods work is a better approach to learning than memorising a set of algorithms to solve specific types of questions. That said, it is of course beneficial to identify techniques that are broadly applicable and to be able to identify when a common solution pattern is likely to work to solve the question at hand.